‘Hi,’ says Tallulah casually.
‘Where’ve you been?’
‘Just for a cycle,’ she replies.
He narrows his eyes at her. ‘On a bike?’
She laughs drily. ‘Yes. Of course on a bike. What else?’
‘You haven’t got a bike.’
‘Borrowed Mum’s.’
‘But what about Noah?’
‘What about Noah?’
‘You left him?’
‘Yeah. I left him with Mum. She told me to go out and get some exercise. I had a headache.’
He pulls off his second trainer and lays it next to the first. ‘Where’d you go?’
‘Just around,’ she says, unzipping her coat and taking it off. She hangs it up then calls out for her mum.
‘In here.’
She follows her mum’s voice into the living room where she’s sitting on the sofa with Noah on her lap.
She takes Noah from her mum and spins him round, then kisses him noisily on his cheek and hugs him to her. ‘How’s my gorgeous boy?’ she says. ‘How’s my gorgeous, gorgeous boy?’ The feel of him in her arms after her time at Scarlett’s house is indescribably relieving. Her skin still crawls with the damp memory of the walls of the tunnel underneath Scarlett’s house and she’s been rubbing imaginary cobwebs off her face, out of her hair, ever since she climbed out of the hole and back into the daylight.
‘Isn’t it the coolest thing ever?’ Scarlett had said, her eyes shining in the light from her phone.
Tallulah had smiled nervously and rubbed at the bare skin on her forearms and said, ‘It’s so spooky.’
‘Yes, but just think,’ Scarlett had continued, ‘we might be the first people to have been down there for like, three hundred, four hundred years. The last people who set foot down there would have been wearing, like, wimples. Talking Shakespearian.’
‘Have you walked to the other end?’
‘Fuck. No.’ Scarlett shook her head hard. ‘God knows what’s down there. A fucking Demogorgon!’ She shuddered and pulled the sleeves of her sweatshirt down over her hands.
Tallulah shuddered too, and put her hands into the soft coat of Toby who stood panting lightly beside her.
Then Scarlett put her hand into Toby’s fur and her fingers found Tallulah’s and laced themselves around them and Tallulah’s breath caught at the sensation. She glanced up and saw Scarlett staring at her, a soft smile playing at the corners of her mouth.
Tallulah had left a few moments later and cycled hard all the way home, trying to purge the darkness of the tunnel, the feel of Scarlett’s fingers entwined around hers and the slightly nauseating jolt of energy she’d felt pass between them that suggested something so far beyond herself or the person she perceived herself to be that it felt almost like a wound.
Now she sits Noah on her knee and rests her lips against the crown of his head, relishing the smell of his scalp, the feeling of being home. Her mum says, ‘Did you have a nice ride?’
‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘It was good to get out.’
Zach walks in.
‘How was the football?’ Tallulah asks, wanting to move away from the topic of her bicycle ride.
‘Great,’ he says, sitting down heavily next to her and placing his hand around the back of her neck. ‘We thrashed them. Four–nil.’ He smells of the pitch, of men, of fresh sweat. She’s suddenly repulsed by his proximity, the feel of his hand against her skin, his very precise male odours. ‘Aren’t you going to shower?’
‘Do I smell?’ He lifts his arm and sniffs his own armpits.